Phyllis Jones Award - Spring '05

The Spring 2005 recipients are as follows:

Project Description: The Greek lyric poet Sappho is at once familiar and obscure in today’s culture. Because of her popular image as an independent, talented, homoerotically-inclined woman of antiquity, Sappho is claimed by feminist writers and lesbian activists as a kind of foremother. But contemporary discussions rarely look beyond Sappho’s symbolic dimension to consider where this legacy comes from, and how it evolved from ancient perceptions of the Lesbian poet. “Alone Among Women” looks closely at a variety of Roman-era testimonies, in their original Greek and Latin, that reference Sappho. It locates the origin of modern understandings of Sappho as transgressive and unique in the literature of this period, when commentators first began to write of her as a sexual and gender deviant.